The immortal life of henrietta lacks quotes

The immortal life of henrietta lacks quotes code#

The way he understood the phone call was: вЂњWeвЂ™ve got your wife. But he had a third-grade education and didnвЂ™t even know what a cell was. So a postdoc called HenriettaвЂ™s husband one day. In the midst of that, one group of scientists tracked down HenriettaвЂ™s relatives to take some samples with hopes that they could use the familyвЂ™s DNA to make a map of HenriettaвЂ™s genes so they could tell which cell cultures were HeLa and which werenвЂ™t, to begin straightening out the contamination problem. It turned out that HeLa cells could float on dust particles in the air and travel on unwashed hands and contaminate other cultures. Twenty-five years after Henrietta died, a scientist discovered that many cell cultures thought to be from other tissue types, including breast and prostate cells, were in fact HeLa cells. When did her family find out about HenriettaвЂ™s cells? After a year, finally she said, fine, letвЂ™s do this thing. Because part of what I was trying to convey to her was I wasnвЂ™t hiding anything, that we could learn about her mother together. I went down to Clover, Virginia, where Henrietta was raised, and tracked down her cousins, then called Deborah and left these stories about Henrietta on her voice mail. So when I started doing my own research, IвЂ™d tell her everything I found. I knew she was desperate to learn about her mother. It took almost a year even to convince HenriettaвЂ™s daughter, Deborah, to talk to me. Part of it was that I just wouldnвЂ™t go away and was determined to tell the story. How did you win the trust of HenriettaвЂ™s family? This fluorescence micrograph of a HeLa cell shows the cytoskeletal microfilaments in red and nuclei stain with Hoechst in blue. But it wasnвЂ™t until I went to grad school that I thought about trying to track down her family. The moment I heard about her, I became obsessed: Did she have any kids? What do they think about part of their mother being alive all these years after she died? Years later, when I started being interested in writing, one of the first stories I imagined myself writing was hers. Everybody learns about these cells in basic biology, but what was unique about my situation was that my teacher actually knew HenriettaвЂ™s real name and that she was black.

I was 16 and a student in a community college biology class. How did you first get interested in this story? Her real name didnвЂ™t really leak out into the world until the 1970s. Other pseudonyms, like Helen Larsen, eventually showed up, too. When some members of the press got close to finding HenriettaвЂ™s family, the researcher whoвЂ™d grown the cells made up a pseudonym-Helen Lane-to throw the media off track. But that wasnвЂ™t something doctors worried about much in the 1950s, so they werenвЂ™t terribly careful about her identity. Today, anonymizing samples is a very important part of doing research on cells.

The immortal life of henrietta lacks quotes code#

When the cells were taken, they were given the code name HeLa, for the first two letters in Henrietta and Lacks. There has been a lot of confusion over the years about the source of HeLa cells. Many scientific landmarks since then have used her cells, including cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization. They went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to cells in zero gravity. They were essential to developing the polio vaccine. HenriettaвЂ™s cells were the first immortal human cells ever grown in culture. No one knows why, but her cells never died. A doctor at Johns Hopkins took a piece of her tumor without telling her and sent it down the hall to scientists there who had been trying to grow tissues in culture for decades without success. She was a black tobacco farmer from southern Virginia who got cervical cancer when she was 30. In her new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, journalist Rebecca Skloot tracks down the story of the source of the amazing HeLa cells, Henrietta Lacks, and documents the cell line's impact on both modern medicine and the Lacks family. Those cells, called HeLa cells, quickly became invaluable to medical research-though their donor remained a mystery for decades. In 1951, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, created the first immortal human cell line with a tissue sample taken from a young black woman with cervical cancer.

The cell lines they need are вЂњimmortalвЂќ-they can grow indefinitely, be frozen for decades, divided into different batches and shared among scientists. Medical researchers use laboratory-grown human cells to learn the intricacies of how cells work and test theories about the causes and treatment of diseases.